My name denies ethnicity at every six-letter stop but I still feel my white skin a needless arbiter, a lie and a limit. I like words, liquids and films -- not necessarily in that reverse-alphabetical order. Rivers are a favorite space, even a lifestyle, as much as a favorite metaphor; and I wish I was in them more and more. For so long I wanted to sing of myself, and I still do, but, as I am plagued by respect for the smartees who came before, I find myself sitting in front of blank pages far too often, dreaming of ways to excise elements of me from my words. Still, I persist. It just takes me a while, a little while longer. The process is the adventure, too. The toughness is to keep words from dying, inert, black on white and staid. The goal is to keep the picture alive and dancing. Thus, a certain navigation of abnegation and disclosure is necessary; this movement between avoidance and acknowledgment. I am more you here than me where I am but untethered letters. Especially in a flux like the internet, this Spinozian series of tubes linking disparate zones and voices and images and hearts and fingers and eyes and organs. My job, such as it is (or may be), is to fold all this into some kind of sense, a meaning made through concretion and flight, through attention, through realization of difference and separation and multitudes bursting past the banister (or, simply, the keyboard). Also, I like to laugh.
I'm afraid to name names but I'd be foolish not to signal, once again, that Cavell and Nabokov and Borges and Agee are giants in my cosmology. But that's just a top tier. Oh, and, _Ecce Homo_ is pretty dope.
No one has written on Ryland Walker Knight's wall.
No one has written on Ryland Walker Knight's wall.